


For the Love of You

by vinegardog



Category: Farscape
Genre: F/M, Heavy Angst
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-03-17
Updated: 2015-03-17
Packaged: 2018-03-18 08:02:00
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,870
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3562256
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/vinegardog/pseuds/vinegardog
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Hope is all that sustains him</p>
            </blockquote>





	For the Love of You

Set in late Season 4 outside of canon storylines and written for a challenge on Terra Firma - WW?D

Rated PG- 13

Word count: about 1770

The characters, as always, are not mine. 

Warning: Happy, it ain’t. So much for the merry spirit of the holidays! 

Thanks to A Damned Scientist for the beta and for coming back with it at the speed of light when I sent it to him.

**For the Love of You (PG-13)**

Heart in his throat, John Crichton rushed through the streets of the backwater planet they had reached just after dark less than a solar day before. He was in search of a safe place. For the last eight arns or so, he had knocked on a thousand doors and, without fail he had been turned away over and over again. As soon as the locals laid their eyes on him, they wrongly assumed he was a Peacekeeper and became wary and hostile. No matter how often and how passionately he told them that he was not there to harm them and that he was not a Peacekeeper - that he was not even Sebacean - nothing could have persuaded them otherwise. He could clearly read it in their eyes. Even the ones who were prepared to listen for a few microts regarded him with ever increasing suspicion, the glint of anxiety in his own eyes making them uncomfortable and mistrustful. Doors were firmly shut in his face and curtains were drawn at the windows. Their will to be charitable verily snuffed out by their previous encounters with violent and arrogant Commandos who came to spend their down time here and who, drunk with raslak and inebriated with the wild abandon of a few arns of freedom from duty, left businesses in ruins and native women violated in their wake.

John felt weary and despairing, barely able to hold on to enough self- control to continue in his quest for safety: his mind was teetering on the brink of desperation. Although he could not blame the locals for being reticent to give assistance, he also felt so frustrated and helpless that he wanted to pull his pulse pistol and force them to open their homes to him at gunpoint, which of course would only have proved them right. This wasn’t him! He didn’t want this person to be him! He could barely recognize himself: his own ferocious thoughts, his wild feelings shook him to his very core. He despised himself for what he knew he may be capable of doing if pushed just a little further.

But he had to save his woman, that was the imperative that drove him and beside that almost nothing else mattered. She was heavy with his child, most likely only arns away from labour. She was scared, tired from prolonged lack of sleep, sick with worry over their uncertain, bleak future and no longer receptive to his empty attempts at comfort.

The pregnancy had been hard on her. She had slowly gone from the proud, strong, dominating woman he had first met to a mere shadow of her former self. Nausea followed by sudden bouts of retching had been wracking her body for weekens now and he worried that that there was only so much even a superior Sebacean physiology like hers could handle. Heavy black circles now marred and underlined the deep blue of her eyes. Her cheekbones – now sharp and pointy – made her face look harder and gaunter than ever before.

Her pregnancy was obvious proof that their DNA was compatible enough for them to procreate but that did not put their troubled minds at ease. Even though they both avoided voicing their fears out loud, he was sure the same questions that burned his mind equally tortured hers: would the child be normal? Would the mixed Human/Sebacean genes produce a healthy baby? Would she survive the delivery of the first hybrid of its kind?

He had no answers to those questions and of course neither did she. So all they could do was hold each other night after night, his face buried in the hair at the nape of her neck, his hand cradling her fast growing belly, his voice whispering soothing little-nothings into her ear when the waves of cramps and nausea engulfed her and she gripped his forearm with a strength that left half-moon bloody nail marks in his skin.

Yesterday, when the fuel in the Marauder they had stolen had finally been reduced to fumes, they had had no choice but to abandon their flight away from the pursuing Peacekeepers and land on this planet. It was after planetary sundown and they had decided to sleep on board before he would set off in search of a safe haven where they could find shelter until their baby was born. Again he had held her through the night, only partially reassured by the swift, hard kicks he could feel under the taut skin of her abdomen. Sleep born of mental and physical exhaustion had overtaken him for a short time. 

He had dreamt of home. 

His father had come to him and in an uncharacteristic show of tactile warmth, Jack had taken him in his arms and hugged him tight. It had not felt good. It had felt like judgement cloaked in feigned affection. The words uttered in his ear had been fierce and final, senior Crichton style: “Your duty is towards the woman who carries your child. Do not fail her, John.”

His mother – the one true solid and unrelentingly supportive figure of his childhood – had come to him next in his dream. She had looked sad, tired, sick. Her features had several times blurred and morphed into the ones of the woman who was lying in his arms in the Marauder and back again to the loved and familiar ones of his childhood. With a rueful smile she had finally uttered words that had made his heart ache: “I will never get to see my grandchild. Promise you will take care of it, Johnny.” 

As bad as these two visitations had been, the next one had made him wake up with a jump, tears streaking his cheeks, heart pounding in his chest. The musical voice of Zhaan – beautiful, serene Zhaan - still ringing in his fatigued-muddled brain and sending shivers through his fevered body:

“Was this worth it, John? Were this woman and the child she carries worth the death of the people you more than once proclaimed to love? Were they worth the annihilation of the gentle creature who selflessly made herself your home for three cycles? Were they worth the death of your friends and crewmates?” 

It was then that he had had to acknowledge what he had managed to push to the very back of his psyche: the bright flash in the sky he had seen from the Marauder main viewer when he had first escaped with her from the Command Carrier – more than three weekens ago now; that flash that he had convinced himself had only been a trick of his mind or maybe starlight dancing on the edge of a plasma-filled nebula had been none other than Moya. Brave, selfless Moya disintegrating in a blaze of failed starburst under the volley of the Carrier’s frag cannons. 

Moya and the ones aboard her were dead. Because of him. Because they had come after him in the hope to save him, to bring him back, to convince him to leave the woman and his child and flee to safety with them.

What was new? Was it not always because of him? How many people had now died for the love of him?

Had he wasted their deaths? No, their deaths would not be in vain if he succeeded in saving the woman twitching and moaning in discomfort in his arms. Their deaths would not be in vain if an innocent living being were to be brought safely into the world and loved like any child should be. He would not fail another one. He would not abandon another one of his children. The one he had left behind on the Royal Planet had been enough. Not again, never again. 

Sleep had utterly failed him after that

*******************

A glimmer of hope. Finally a glimmer of hope! 

John had found a place for them. A kind soul had taken pity on him, seen beyond his confounding appearance and straight through to his aching heart. He had been offered shelter; a bed where he could lay her down and assist her while she was in the throes of child-birth; blankets to keep her and their baby warm; nutritious food that might just be enough to fill her breast with life-giving milk; a roof over their heads and walls around them to protect them from the prying eyes of any Peacekeeper patrol that might have been sent to this village to track them down. 

Safety from capture also meant hope that they might someday soon - when she had regained her health and mobility - be able to slip away from here to find a place of their own where they might live as a family free from fear and persecution.

Hope. That is all he had to hold on to. Hope.

The Marauder was where he had left it, hidden under the tree canopy on the edge of town. John’s heavy heart lifted when he realized that there were no signs of other Peacekeeper vessels nearby and that the entrance to their ship had not been forced or blasted open. Nobody had been here since he had left earlier in the day; nobody had come to take her away from him.

He broke into a run to cover the last few metras that separated him from the entrance hatch. He climbed the steep steps up to it two at a time and while entering the access code in the door pad, he keenly called out to her to warn her that it was only him, to tell her not to be afraid, to let her know that he was back and that he had good news.

When his fumbling fingers finally completed the code sequence, the hatch opened with a soft hiss. He stepped through it and called out to her again, eager like a playful puppy, proud that he had been able to provide a refuge for them. 

A wall of silence met his hails.

As his eyes slowly adjusted to the shaded interior of the ship, he took five long strides that brought him flush to the side of the cot where he had left her lying less than 12 arns ago.

Mele-On’s open vacant eyes stared up at him. The gold covers that he had left wrapped around her now lay on the floor, blemished by an ugly, large stain of dried blood. 

Numb, unbelieving, John lay a hand on her still gravid, extended belly and felt nothing. No stirrings, no kicking, no life.

John Crichton leaned heavily against the bulkhead opposite her dead body and let himself slide down to the floor. 

He had failed her. He had failed their child. 

It had – all of it – been in vain. 

 

THE END


End file.
